Friday, February 24, 2012

"The Noctua NF-F12 was a nice surprise. We were expecting it to be like many of the other fans on the market today, making claims that they just barely cover, if at all. The NF-F12 claims it can cool as well or better than fans pushing more CFM, and do so with less noise. It claims right on the box that it "creates outstanding static pressure and focuses the airflow for superior performance". During our tests it met those claims.

Noctua also made claims of "trusted premium quality", this makes the assumption of prior experience with their products, and perhaps given the quality of this product we can allow them that bit of slightly arrogant assumption.

The extension & Y-cables, and Low Noise Adaptor are nice additions showing that Noctua thinks about more than just building fans, but also how and where they are going to be used. By including both screws and rubber anti-vibration mounting pins Noctua has created a whole package with this product allowing it to be used on radiators, heatsinks, or cases with with several options for mounting and connecting it.

This fan has so many features it would be hard to cover them in a conversation (we learned this the hard way) but they are all geared toward making this fan quieter and more efficient ant the same time. We can attest to the fact that they do just this. One feature we have to accept their word for is the custom PWM IC. It is to allow the fan to run quieter at low speeds by reducing the switching noise from the PWM circuit. The fan was so quiet that we aren't sure if it was needed or not.

While we are always game to test another fan this one will be staying in what ever system we are running tests on until one comes along that can beat it for noise to performance ratio. We're betting it will be in the system for a long while."